DOUBLE DREAM/LETTERS TO MILENA, KINGS PLACE, LONDON
Independent.co.uk
Tuesday, 24 February 2009
If classical improvisation is difficult, it’s doubly so when the goal
is transposition into jazz; how two pianists can combine together
in this way is hard to imagine. But for the Russian pianist Mikhail
Rudy, two heads have long been better than one. His defining infant
experience was hearing phrases which came through the wall from a
violinist who was practising next door, and finding he could answer
him on the piano. Later in life, rehearsals for Double Dream – in
which he and the Ukrainian pianist Misha Alperin would turn Bach,
Chopin, and Debussy into jazz – have had, for logistical reasons,
to take place over the telephone.
And with their Steinways interlocking in the perfect acoustic of
Kings Place, we heard the results. They started with the lights
down, opening with a rumination on Schumann’s "Prophet Bird" which
rang out gorgeously in the gloom, then, with twin video screens
focusing on hands and faces, they embarked on the most extraordinary
classical/jazz conversation I’ve ever heard. Sometimes the classical
pieces were first played straight, and then ingeniously messed with –
subverting a poised Chopin mazurka by suddenly dropping it a semitone,
letting a Debussy Etude with a walking bass suddenly run so fast that
it took off into space. Using a cross between a bagpipe and a mouth
organ, Alperin launched into an Armenian dance by Komitas, which Rudy
countered with mournful Arabic octaves; Stravinsky’s "Petrushka"
came in obliquely and stratospherically high, then found its feet
in a majestic full-dress performance. A dainty tune by Haydn seemed
to close the proceedings, was blown to smithereens by monumental
crashing chords, then resurfaced like a perfumed musical box amid
smoking ruins: in this interplay between seriousness and mockery,
nothing was what it seemed for very long.
The following night’s collaboration was between Rudy and the actor
Peter Guinness: in Letters to Milena, Kafka’s love letters to his young
paramour were accompanied by a selection of pieces from Janacek’s
In the Mists and On an Overgrown Path. The result was hauntingly
dramatic: the morose urgency with which Guinness infused the words
was answered by a kaleidoscope of emotions from the piano; each art
form was enriched by the other.